Summing up the electoral struggle, Mr. Cherevnin calculates that the opposition has "purely artificially, only by completely exceptional measures, wrested 49 seats." Adding these seats to those actually won gives, in his view, the number 207, i.e., altogether only 15 short of an absolute majority. The author's conclusion: "on the basis of the June 3rd system, without extraordinary artificial measures, the gentry-serf-owning reaction would have suffered a complete and decisive (?!) defeat at the elections."

"In the face of this," continues the author, "enormous danger to gentry landownership…" the conflicts between priests and landowners are unimportant (p. 85 of cited book).

Here are the consequences of the slogan about wresting the Duma from the hands of reaction! Cherevnin has painfully punished Martov by following through his slogan to absurdity and fixing, so to speak, together with "the results of the electoral struggle" the results of liquidationist illusions.

A progressist-Cadet majority in the Fourth Duma would have presented a pogrom-like danger to gentry landownership"! This is simply a pearl.

But this is no slip of the tongue—it is the inevitable result of all the ideological content that liberals and liquidationists sought to invest in the electoral campaign.

The gigantic increase in the role of the Progressists compared to the Cadets, the embodiment by these Progressists in politics of all the renegadesm (Vekhi-ism) of the Cadets, the actual transition, silently and furtively, of the Cadets themselves to the position of Progressism—all of this the liquidationists did not wish to see, and all of this led them to Cherevnin's "pearl." "One should not speak too much about the counter-revolutionary nature of the Cadets"—so or approximately so wrote once a Labour man (Populist-liquidationist) Mr. Vodovozov. Our liquidationists viewed things precisely the same way.

They even forgot the lesson of the Third Duma, where Cadet Berezovskii in an official speech "explained" the agrarian program of the Cadets and proved that it was advantageous to the gentry-landowners. And now, in 1912, from an "oppositional" gentry Duma, from the Progressists, these slight repackagings of Octobrists, one is to expect "an enormous danger to gentry landownership"…

Listen, Mr. Cherevnin… fantasize, but know the measure!

We have a splendid illustration of the results of elections in connection with Cherevnin's assessment of the outcome of liquidationist tactics. The Fourth Duma adopted, by 132 votes to 78, the formula of the Progressists' transition.

None other than Octobrist Antonov officially declared complete satisfaction with this most vulgar, emptiest of formulas, as an Octobrist formula! Of course, Mr. Antonov is right. The Progressists introduced a purely Octobrist formula. The Progressists played their role as mediators between Octobrists and Cadets.

Octobrisim is defeated, long live Octobrisim! The Octobrisim of Tukhkov is "defeated," long live the Octobrisim of Efremov and Lvov[45].